ZeRTO, a storage start-up

A buzz is developing around ZeRTO, an Israeli stealth startup. It was founded in 2009 by two brothers, Ziv and Oded Kedem, who previously founded Kashya to develop replication technology for disaster recovery.

EMC bought Kashya in 2006 for $153m, and the technology is in the RecoverPoint product. ZeRTO gained a $200,000 investment as startup funding in January from Greylock Partners. What it did with the money was promising enough to spark a $6.2m funding round in May with Battery Ventures joining Greylock to provide the cash.

ZeRTO could stand for zero RTO (Recovery Time Objective) which would relate back to the Kashya replication technology for disaster recovery. The company says it is developing next-generation data services for dynamic IT environments, focused on virtual and cloud environments: "addressing the needs of virtualised mission-critical applications."

Could we be looking at automated failover of a virtualised application to a standby instance in the cloud? The standby instance could be kept up to date via state change information squirted across from the primary instance using replication technology.

It's now six months since ZeRTO's $6.2m cash infusion and we should be hearing more in the coming months. ®